1. Technical Field
Aspects of this document relate generally to the fields of data compression and decompression.
2. Background Art
The most difficult part of hardware based decompression of deflate data is decoding blocks of dynamic Huffman coded data. Such blocks have a header that describes two Huffman codes, one for literal and length values and one for distance values. The rest of the block contains codewords encoded with these two codes. The general concept of decompressing dynamic Huffman codes is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,764,205, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Traditionally, a TCAM-based decoder suffers from logic and routing problems if used on its own. Alternatively, using RAM-based lookup has historically been fast and efficient, but the use of a single RAM results in a prohibitively long loading time.